Listen to Me Read online

  The thing was, the suggestion itself to get out the computer wasn’t half bad. They could have used it to look for hotels. If the situation was as dire as the broadcasts were saying, then it might have been nice to have a sure thing waiting for them when the storm came. But the quiver in Maggie’s voice had riled him with its intimation that their lives—their lives: Maggie’s and his—were somehow suddenly at risk. She’d gone and gotten desperate, illogical—“This could be bad. This could be Katrina bad. Sandy bad”—which had killed his driving buzz completely.

  Nope. He wasn’t about to give in to the computer. He’d so far resisted bringing it into his classroom (to the ire of his colleagues), and he would resist, for as long as possible, bringing it into every aspect of their lives.

  A few years back, Mark’s father turned him on to some intriguing articles about server farms and data barns, articles suggesting that the move from paper to e-readers wasn’t nearly as green or eco-friendly as his and most other universities were insisting. Plus, the Internet’s energy consumption was something like ten billion watts of electricity in the United States alone, with another twenty billion in the rest of the world, which was equivalent to the output of something like thirty nuclear power plants, which—come on!—was a wholly mind-boggling statistic. Once a month or so, whenever Robert forwarded a new series of articles, Mark printed one or two of them out, made a couple dozen copies off campus (no way was he going to use his copy card and risk a lecture from the chair), and then posted them in the department hallways.

  The point? Fuck the computer. How had they secured hotels in the past on road trips? The old-fashioned way: by stopping and asking if there was a room.

  “They probably don’t even have Wi-Fi here,” Mark said.

  “They have Wi-Fi everywhere,” she said.

  “How about this? After dinner we’ll find a hotel, and then you can knock yourself out all you want on that thing.”

  She hadn’t responded, but he could tell her brain had returned to whatever haunted house it had been popping in on since news of the college girl. He hated to resent a dead woman, one who’d died so ignominiously, but he’d nearly gotten Maggie back. She’d almost been restored to him. Instead, he could see from her face—the trembling lower lip she was biting to keep calm—that she was already playing out worst-case scenarios: a tree in the road, which would lead to a blocked avenue, which would lead to an unfamiliar route, which would lead to a dead end, which would lead to the Bates Motel. It was too much.

  “I’ll get the coffee,” he said.

  Five minutes later, he was standing inside the gas station’s coffee shop/convenience mart, and he was watching Maggie walk Gerome. The two of them were going back and forth over a narrow strip of grass. Gerome wasn’t doing anything but sniffing. Maggie was talking to him—he could see from inside, see her lips moving—probably trying to coax him into lifting his leg. But Gerome was ignoring her. If he didn’t want to pee, he wasn’t going to. No amount of baby talk was going to change that.

  Who was that woman out there? And what was the possibility that he’d actually spend his life with her? His whole life? Think about it: what were the actual odds? There were statistics on these sorts of things. If he wanted, he could probably walk down the hall to Sociology and get the exact and most-up-to-date numbers on his chances of staying married. Mark’s guess? The odds were against them. The odds probably said that they had another four, maybe five years together. Which was about how many years Gerome had left. But then, if that were the case, if that’s how he really felt, then why’d he marry her at all? And hadn’t they survived the first seven—okay, maybe not this most recent one, but the six before that and the three before marriage—hadn’t they survived those years in style, with class? She hadn’t cheated. Neither had he. He’d never even thought about it.

  Okay, sure, fine, yes. There was Elizabeth, his former research assistant. But they hadn’t touched. Not once! Plus, she’d dropped out of the program last spring. Academia, she told him, wasn’t for her. And over the summer she’d moved to California, so it’s not as though they could have messed around even if they wanted to. But, fine—all things on the table?—there had been some e-mails, and those didn’t look good for anyone.

  In the past, he’d made a point of checking his work correspondence only once a week. He even had a little caveat about it on his syllabus: Contrary to popular belief, professors do not, in fact, sit at their computers all day long waiting for the next student missive. If you e-mail me, it should be important. If you e-mail me, you should expect to wait at least one week before hearing back. Every Friday he went to campus specifically to check e-mail and catch up on student communication. It usually took four or five hours to sort through and respond, but he preferred losing one large block of time once a week to losing minnow-bite moments here and there every day. Imagine how quickly a day—a life!—could be subsumed by those moments if you let it. The thought made him itch.

  But then, last fall, he’d gotten that first e-mail from Elizabeth: “If I called you devilishly handsome, would you mind? And if I told you that I think about you, what then?”

  It was Elizabeth who’d first brought his attention to the group of online activists who called themselves Anonymous. She’d suggested it as the final chapter for his book, not that he was anywhere close to being finished. But the chapters were outlined, and Elizabeth, he suspected rightly, had said his history would be incomplete if it failed to address the future of anonymity. He’d been too myopic in his research, focusing almost entirely on pretenses that led to death—stonings, masked hangmen, firing squads, kill buttons on death row. He’d been looking down and back instead of up and out. It meant so much more research. It meant creating a new timeline and giving into a delayed deadline. It meant delving into a world of materials that existed entirely online. The irony didn’t elude him; his colleagues would chide him—“The luddite takes on the Internet,” they’d say when they caught wind—but Elizabeth was right. It wasn’t just Anonymous. It was Occupy. It was crowdsourcing. There was anonymity in inclusiveness, a “we” instead of an “I” that meant an end to ownership and the possibility of meaningful blame. Anyone was starting to feel very much like everyone. But Mark wasn’t there yet; wasn’t yet ready to draw the necessary conclusions or complete the larger argument. It was a process, one step at a time. The chapters needed to build on one another, and Elizabeth had taught him the importance of surprise, of the willingness to be surprised by what he found. It was essential that, while he might have a theory—a working theory—it not be set in stone until he was absolutely ready. She’d opened up a whole new approach. He’d have called her his muse if it wouldn’t have sounded so outrageous.

  Before writing her back, he’d switched over from his professional account to his personal one. He avoided answering either of her questions directly, instead asking her about life after academia.

  That was nearly nine months ago, just after the mugging. Now he checked his e-mail daily, whenever he was on campus and sometimes when he walked Gerome alone. He changed the passwords on both accounts so that it was no longer Maggie’s birthday: sign number one that he knew his back-and-forth with Elizabeth wasn’t on the up-and-up. Sign number two was that he sometimes thought of her, alone, in the shower, and one time during sex with Maggie. She, Elizabeth, came from a grossly conservative family in New England, and she was grossly conservative herself. But she made Mark laugh and she had this joie de vivre, this confidence that, perhaps because he knew it came from money, made him want to snatch her up and bend her over. But it was sign number three that really mattered, sign number three that told him in no uncertain terms that he was definitely crossing a line: if he’d caught wind of Maggie doing anything remotely similar: texting, e-mailing, straight-up flirting the way he’d been doing—he’d be furious.

  He took another look at Maggie, at her long limbs and good posture—That’s my wife, goddamn it! Wife!—no, not furious: he’d be livid. And the
re it was.

  5

  It was a childish habit—checking under all the doors in a public washroom to make sure someone wasn’t lurking—because what would Maggie do if she actually found someone? Scream? Fight back? Wilt? Yet she could never resist the urge.

  In this particular bathroom, Maggie discovered only one pair of feet. They were at the far end of the glinty silver latrine, behind the final stall door, which was closed and, presumably, locked. And they were turned, these feet were, in the wrong direction—as if the person attached to them might be barfing or about to flush the toilet. Maggie hurried back to the opposite end of the room, taking the toilet closest to the exit. She locked the door, covered the seat with paper, squatted so her skin wasn’t even touching, then started peeing as quickly as possible.

  She was acutely aware of the sound coming from the only other compartment in use. Or, rather, she was aware of a lack of sound. Though she loathed in general the prospect of listening to another person pee (or worse), she was further loath to find herself in an enclosed space with someone who wasn’t using it for its intended purpose. She knew about public restrooms. Everybody knew about public restrooms. At the girls’ school she’d attended when she was little, a teacher had been raped in one of the stalls after hours. It was her first encounter with the word. She’d taken it home to her mother, without yet comprehending its meaning. From the way her teacher had said it, she’d understood that the word had negative connotations. But when her mother explained it, jabbing her index finger into the invisible air between them, Maggie thought she might faint from embarrassment. “Never mind,” she’d said, backing up slowly. “Never mind,” she’d said again, as though she could undo her sudden new knowledge; undo the existence of the word’s meaning altogether.

  Still squatting, Maggie bent over even farther and angled herself so that she could peek—her shorts around her knees—under the partition in the direction of the far toilet. Though there were several stalls between them, she could clearly make out the feet, which were now firmly facing in Maggie’s direction. She sat up clumsily; the tiniest splash of urine landed on her underwear.

  She closed her eyes and flushed; her heart practiced hand-speed drills against her breastplate. An image—one that didn’t belong to her, one that belonged, if at all, to the coed—skimmed along the backs of her eyelids, a pebble across a pond. The detectives had worked up to the more gruesome photographs. They’d started with a shot of the coed’s building. Then a shot of the coed herself—professionally taken, nondescript gray background, cocked head, sweet but canned smile. The third photo was of the back of her head. An oval bruise was below the hairline, just above the nape of her neck. Her chin—what Maggie could see of her chin from the angle of the camera—was pushed up against the base of a toilet. Maggie had looked up at the detectives. “It’s just like my bruise,” she’d said, massaging her neck. They’d nodded. They’d felt so certain—the three of them—that it must have been the same man. But by the time they’d run the gamut of mug shots—there’d been a witness to the murder—they discovered it wasn’t. Mark, when he got home, after he saw the cops standing over her and then had seen what they’d been showing her, was furious. “What I’m trying to figure out,” he kept saying, pacing toward the kitchen table, then away from it, “is why you felt the need to show her these?” He’d grabbed at the photos of the coed, but they’d swiped them from his reach. “Explain the logic,” he kept saying. “Just help me understand.” It was Maggie who showed the detectives to the door. And in the morning, it was Maggie—though she knew it wasn’t the same man; they all did—who began surfing the web for pocket pistols. Online, she discovered a whole world dedicated entirely to personal defense. She’d found it utterly entrancing.

  She used an elbow now to push her way hastily out of the stall, nearly racing to the bathroom’s exit.

  Outside the sun was blinding, the air thick. She took a deep breath, then exhaled steadily.

  It was hard to believe they were headed in the direction of a multi-state storm, but she’d gotten out her phone while she was walking Gerome and a brief search had turned up some legitimately brutal photos as evidence—loose power lines, homes with trees resting on their roofs. An old man was dead, though that might have been an unrelated story. Still.

  Gerome hadn’t peed when she walked him, but at least he’d gotten to stretch his legs.

  She made a beeline across the parking lot in the direction of the car. She’d left the windows cracked, but Maggie knew it sometimes took fewer than fifteen minutes for a dog to die from heat stroke. She’d seen it too many times before.

  A man dressed as a cowboy tipped his hat in her direction as they crossed paths on the asphalt.

  “Nice tits,” he said.

  She stopped, then turned. Instinctively, she raised a hand to her chest, a protective gesture. A man was accosting her in broad daylight. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  The man, who had also stopped and turned, also said, “Excuse me?”

  “What did you say to me?” Her therapist had once told her that, for victims, confrontation could be a powerful tool. To ignore new moments of vulnerability might be to encourage preexisting fear.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Just now,” said Maggie, “what did you say?”

  “Did I say something?”

  “You did.”

  Except now Maggie wasn’t sure. Now she was confused. She’d heard the word so precisely: tits. But now the voice she perceived in her head didn’t match up with the one this cowboy was using. Evidence indicated that babies, after birth, could distinguish sounds once heard in utero. Maggie wondered now if she’d plucked this word—this tits—from a memory, from a memory of a memory, or, worse, from an article she’d read earlier that morning. Space, as a concept, kept a certain type of person awake at night—its vastness; its ceaselessness; the notion, for instance, that the Milky Way itself was a blip on something numinously more massive. What sometimes kept Maggie awake was the idea of auditory dimensions and the infinitesimally imperceptible regions of her own head. It was possible she’d been hallucinating, but possible also that her energetic id had an internal voice that had chosen this moment to introduce itself.

  “Did I wish you a nice day?” the man said. “My wife says I’m always wishing people nice days. She says I’m on autopilot half the time. Half the time, she says, I have no idea what I’m saying.”

  A woman in the distance whistled.

  The cowboy turned, gave a thumbs-up, then looked back at Maggie. “There she is now. Bet you anything I’m in hot water just for talking to you.” He tipped his hat again. “Nice day,” he said. Then he was gone.

  Maggie didn’t know what to say, only what not to say. She would not be telling Mark about this. He wouldn’t have believed her.

  Immediately beneath Maggie’s moccasins was a freshly paved twelve-inch surface covering made of sand and rock glued together with man-made hydrocarbons, beneath which was a six-inch layer of recycled asphalt product, beneath which was an underlayment of gravel, beneath which—deep, deep, deep beneath—was the continental crust itself, igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. Some twenty miles beneath the crust was the lithosphere, beneath which was the asthenosphere, beneath which was the upper mantel, beneath which was the liquid outer core, beneath which was the solid inner core, where—on this particular day—the temperature was just shy of 10,800°F, as hot as the surface of the sun.

  Some thirty-nine thousand miles above, Maggie shivered.

  6

  The barista called his name. Mark turned to pick up the order only to find a large man in a Western-style hat standing between him and the counter. The man was gazing out the massive tinted window of the gas station in the direction of Maggie, who was now cleaning off the windshield with one of those convenience wipers they leave between pumps.

  “You know the one about how to tell a wife from a girlfriend?” It was the man talking, tho
ugh he wasn’t looking at Mark. He was still looking out the window.

  “Pardon me?” said Mark.

  “It’s a joke,” the man said. “The joke is that a girlfriend looks like she’s just had a good fucking and—”

  Mark coughed. “You have me confused with someone who’s interested.” He stepped in front of the man and picked up the coffees.

  The man stepped with him, resting an elbow on the counter so that Mark’s immediate path to the exit was blocked.

  “A wife,” the man said, nodding his hat in the direction of the window, “looks like she needs one.”

  “You just said what to me?” Mark thought maybe the barista would intervene, but he was at the cash register at the other end of the counter, taking someone else’s order.

  “I’m fucking with you, Bucko.” The man laughed. “Just two guys joshing around. I like your wife. It’s a compliment.”

  This was the problem with gas stations, with rest stops in general. They were teeming with chance encounters between human beings who, under any other circumstance, would have no reason or opportunity to engage.

  The question now was how to respond. Was there an action Mark could take that would be nobler than another? He wasn’t sure, in this case, if Maggie needed defending. She wasn’t present and hadn’t heard and therefore couldn’t be personally wounded. And yet to say nothing seemed potentially cowardly. He felt unsure of his role, his duty. Perhaps it was best in these instances—always best—simply to move on and away as quickly as possible, which was what he did, shoving past the man, a cup in either hand.